GK’s comment

De Ferran got up to third and was actually leading the race during pitstops when he was hit in the back by Jeret Schroeder as he slowed to enter the pits, spinning into the wall. Castroneves also streaked towards the front and was running second to Sam Hornish Jr when his engine blew.

De Ferran and Castroneves obviously hope for better luck in the Indianapolis 500, where they'll run in more familiar Marlboro red and white, but without the brand name to suit American tobacco laws which allow tobacco brands to sponsor only one racing series.

Chip Ganassi's successful return to Indy last year with Juan Pablo Montoya paved the way for Penske's reappearance at the Speedway after a five-year absence from the 500 caused by the CART-IRL split. With two of CART's top teams running this year's 500, as well as Derrick Walker's existing IRL team, and Michael Andretti's announcement of his plans expected any day, it looks like a steady creep is underway. Surely, in three or four years all of CART's teams will be back at Indianapolis?

But it's expensive - upwards of US$3 million - to put together a winning IRL car, engine and team. It also takes a huge additional effort in the middle of an extremely busy schedule of 21 or 22 CART races so that only the richest and most successful CART teams will be able to afford or undertake such a diversion.

Barry Green made clear his opposition to racing at Indianapolis in Autosport magazine's CART season preview (March 8 issue), saying: "We won't risk hurting the CART programme. CART takes priority by far over the Indy 500."

Carl Haas has repeatedly told me how fiercely opposed he is to racing in the Indy 500 and, like Green, says he has absolutely no commercial pressure from his sponsors to run the race. For everyone else it's just too damn expensive and too much of a potentially disastrous diversion even to entertain the idea.

Another point is that Ganassi's team may have won last year's Indy 500, but they lost the CART championship to Penske after a record four-year stretch as champions. Sure, there were other factors. Ganassi switched last year to Lola chassis and Toyota engines, but on the basis of last season it looks like the effort required to win the Indy 500 will drain the resources required to win the CART title. If Penske can't achieve both goals, nobody can do it, so the end result of this year's double dip by Penske and Ganassi will be watched with interest by the other CART teams.

The incredible thing is that this divisive and deleterious situation should exist at all. By inventing the IRL, Tony George has made it much more expensive and more difficult for CART teams to race at his track and he's also seriously damaged the fan and media interest in open-wheel, oval racing in America, the very thing he professed to save by creating the IRL.

The IRL season-opener at Phoenix was a case in point. The track built a tradition of Champ Car racing over 30 years and the CART races at the track drew big crowds, but that all changed when former track owner Buddy Jobe made the decision to go with the IRL in 1996.

Crowds dropped off and haven't recovered. This year's IRL race at Phoenix was merged with the Copper World Classic, a long-established February weekend for midgets and supermodifieds which has been having troubles of its own. The combined weekend did no better, however, so that two formerly strong race weekends have become one very mediocre affair.

The fact is whatever happens with CART's soon-to-be-determined 2003 engine rules, whatever entreaties CART or its engine manufacturers make to the IRL, Tony George has made a personal commitment to proceed down his own path. After four or five years of talk and attempted negotiations it's clear there's no way to produce common technical rules or combine the two organisations - one a publicly-traded company, the other a very private, family enterprise. George has created and maintained a civil war, a Balkan conflict that sadly, will not go away.